WordPress Blogs to Accept Cyrillic, Estonian and Polish Text?

We want to blog in Russian Cyrillic text, Ukrainian Cyrillic text and Polish and Estonian Latin text. Yet wordpress doesnt seem to want us to do that.

After some Googling, I learned that one might insert some // before something in the wp-config folder, but that didn’t work.

I asked our host about it. First I got flannel:

UTF8 should work for the fonts. When was the website initially created? There was a recent change where we changed to UTF8. You might try a test with a new DB and see if it acts differently as your old db may have some previous settings

Well that was just bollocks. So we tried again. We then got this:

The database is able to handle Russian and Polish text, we will just have to change the collation of the tables and the database to utf8_general_ci to allow these characters, however it is not able to go back through and correct the characters it is only able to handle this for new additions to the databases. To make these changes you need to go log in to phpmyadmin and go to the database you would like to change it for and change the collation option under operations per table that will need to have the characters.

Some stuff in there shows utf8_swedish_ci — I tried to change it without success. (Actually, our blog accepts Swedish, Norwegian and other Scandinavian text).

Really, tweaking databases is beyond me. Should these people not help with this?

If these guys supply databases *internationally* to *international* clients, the damn things should work with *international* languages without all this…….. as they seemingly don’t, I am requesting *support* to enable this. Why does it become *my* responsibility to enable *their* databases to work properly?

At this time, the jury is still out. Our hosts are still fudging. The wordpress forums are not telling me.

If you know how to make ALL EUROPEAN fonts — Latin and Cyrillic work with this wordpress site, please tell us below (but not in Russian, Estonian or Polish because it doesn’t work). We might even teach our hosts something.

The problem with question marks showing up in place of special character is always an issue with collation mismatches (as previously stated). I apologize that we’ve not brought this to a solution sooner, one of our previous technicians should have properly escalated this to a higher technician and had it solved much quicker.

That said, I’ve gone ahead and made the necessary changes for your database to function properly and I’ve got a post in your back end using special characters as a test and I can confirm they are no longer showing up as ?’s.

thanks a lot for your post!!! do you have any idea which changes your hoster made to the databse? as I soon will setup a wordpress-blog in german and russian for one of my clients I would be extremely interested in any further information!